Today, information technology professionals often encounter myriad different problems and challenges during the operation of a computer network or network of networks. For example, these individuals must often cope with network device failures and/or software application errors brought about by causes such as configuration errors. In order to permit network operators and managers to track down the sources of such problems, network monitoring devices capable of recording and logging vast amounts of information concerning network communications have been developed.
Conventional network monitoring devices, however, suffer from scalability problems. For example, because of finite storage space associated with such devices, conventional network monitoring devices may not be able to monitor all of the nodes or communication links associated with large enterprise networks or networks of networks. For this reason, such network monitoring devices may need to be deployed in a network of their own, with lower level monitoring devices reporting up to higher level monitoring devices.
In such a network of monitoring devices it is important to allow for synchronizing and consolidating the network traffic information to provide information regarding the overall network performance. The present invention addresses such needs.